Responsive Design Web Developer, London

Responsive Design

Responsive Design is an important CSS technique which has risen from the rising popular of non-desktop devices, such as Mobile Phones and Tablets. The increased use of internet browsing on these devices has meant that websites have had to be adapted to use of smaller screens, having previously only taken into account larger screen sizes of desktop computers.

There are several ways of handling users from different devices and one of the more straight forward and robust is to use Responsive Design CSS through Media Queries. Alternatively, it is also possible to redirect users to other customised websites depending on their device, but this would need greater maintenance going forward as well, and also be reliant on the accuracy of User Agents.

Responsive Design with Media Queries simply adapt the same page to the browser’s available space, be in Desktop, Tablet or Mobile, without going off anywhere new. Media Queries can be set up to cover ranges of resolutions and this means that future devices will also likely be handled correctly in most cases.

All new CSS techniques are likely to have limitations dependant on legacy browsers and Responsive Design is not different in that regard. There are however several javascript plugins which can alleviate this problem to a certain degree, with all significant browsers able to handle Media Queries once they have been used. Respond.js by Scott Jehl and css3-mediaqueries.js by Wouter van der Graaf are two of the more popular javascript fixes for consistent cross-browser Media Query handling, find them in the useful resources section below.